Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works

Salman A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works is a close textual analysis of Rushdie’s five major Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. It focuses on the manner in which Rushdie is a postmodern writer whose subject is the postcolonial moment and makes the point that unlike many other contemporary subcontinental authors writing in English, Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse, instead, is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so attempt to clear a “new” postmodern space. Hassumani uses poststructural and postmodern theory as a device to access Rushdie’s texts not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises in his major political novels, but also to facilitate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel. Specifically, she discusses the manner in which Rushdie responds to the contemporary subcontinental moment from his postmodern angle of vision and identifies and analyzes three of his major ideas via a close reading of his historical events are accessible only through interpretation which leads to versions of meanings; exclusively privileging the past, present, or future leads to repression and suppression which results in violence; reality is a construct, and those who survive it well do so due to their ability to bend, be adaptable, and engage with the enabling power of hybridity and intermingling.